The Assassination of James Forrestal

by David Martin

  Driven Patriot

  The book we are speaking of is the 587-page biography, Driven Patriot, the Life and Times of James Forrestal, by Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley.9 In their two chapters on Forrestal’s decline and death, Hoopes and Brinkley reference Simpson’s book only once, and they do that very dismissively at the conclusion of their chapter on Forrestal’s death, versus 23 references to Rogow. We shall have a good deal more to say about the Rogow and Simpson books later in this chapter, but first, let us examine the work that has long been considered to be the last word on the subject of Forrestal’s life in general and his death in particular. This biography, by a former Under Secretary of the Air Force and a young man who has gone on to become perhaps the best-known academic historian in the country, was named a Notable Book of the Year (1992) by The New York Times, although the Book Review Digest records only seven reviews in periodicals. In their concluding paragraph to Chapter 32, which is entitled “Breakdown,” they make their lone reference to the Simpson book, in order to shoot it down. They admit that there have been doubters of the suicide story, led by Forrestal’s own older brother, Henry, who suggest that either “the Communists” or “the Jews” did him in, with the help of the Truman government, but they dismiss the notion with a wave of the hand, based upon what they say are “the facts of the case.”10

  It is interesting, indeed, to learn that in this case a man as close to Forrestal as his older brother Henry did not believe that the death was a suicide, so what were the “facts of the case” on the night of the death, as recounted by Hoopes and Brinkley?

  Those supposed “facts” are in the preceding pages of the chapter, and they are very cleverly laid out with lots of details as though the authors were flies on the wall observing everything. Forrestal had seemed calm and even in high spirits on the two preceding days, a Friday and a Saturday, they tell us, but now it looked like the usual Sunday-night radio pounding from Drew Pearson had gotten the better of him. The Navy corpsman assigned to keep watch on him up until midnight had observed him pacing the floor and had grown worried. Forrestal had told the corpsman that he did not want to take the usual prescribed sedative because he planned to stay up and read. The corpsman had tried to alert the doctor on duty, sleeping in the room next to Forrestal that something was wrong with Forrestal’s emotional state, but the doctor brushed him off and went on to bed.

  Another corpsman came on at midnight. He was new to the job, a stand-in for the regular guy who, according to the authors, had gone absent without leave on a drunken bender. The new man, they say, looked into the room at about 1:45 and saw Forrestal copying a morbid poem from Mark Van Doren’s Anthology of World Poetry, “The Chorus from Ajax,” in which Ajax, they say, in a forlorn state of mind contemplates suicide. The book, they tell us, was bound in red leather in decorated in gold. Then they furnish the lines that Forrestal supposedly actually had copied:

  Fair Salamis, the billows’ roar

  Wander around thee yet,

  And sailors gaze upon thy shore

  Firm in the Ocean set.

  Thy son is in a foreign clime

  Where Ida feeds her countless flocks,

  Far from thy dear, remembered rocks,

  Worn by the waste of time–

  Comfortless, nameless, hopeless save

  In the dark prospect of the yawning grave....

  Woe to the mother in her close of day,

  Woe to her desolate heart and temples gray,

  When she shall hear

  Her loved one’s story whispered in her ear!

  “Woe, woe!’ will be the cry–

  No quiet murmur like the tremulous wail

  Of the lone bird, the querulous nightingale–11

  The copying supposedly ended right at the word, “nightingale.” This fact sends the authors off onto a flight of fancy, based upon the speculation of John Loftus, that Forrestal must have been overwhelmed with feelings of guilt at that point for having authorized a CIA operation with the code name of “Nightingale” that infiltrated expatriate Ukrainian spies into the Soviet Union, many of whom were former Nazi collaborators guilty of horrible atrocities against Jews.12

  Then the authors tell us precisely where Forrestal inserted the sheet of paper into the book and then, as if they were there observing it, that he walked out of the room to the kitchen across the hall, tied the sash from his dressing gown to the radiator beneath the window, and tried to hang himself outside the window, but the sash “gave way” and he fell 13 floors to the 3rd floor roof of a hallway below, dying instantly from the fall. The corpsman wasn’t there to prevent it, they tell us, because Forrestal had ordered him off on an errand to get him out of the way.

  Meanwhile, the corpsman who had been on duty earlier, we are told, had returned to his barracks but he had been unable to sleep. He returned to get a cup of coffee at the hospital at a “canteen,” which was presumably still open, when he encountered a great commotion. Somehow, he knew without being told what had happened, and, sure enough, he encountered the young doctor on duty whom he had tried to warn and was given the tragic news.13

  The Hoopes and Brinkley account might sound persuasive to the uncritical reader, but there is a great deal of missing information. They tell us nothing from the people in the position to know, the Navy corpsman and the doctor who were on duty there on the 16th floor at the time of the death. Interestingly, Hoopes and Brinkley even withhold their names, as though they are afraid that someone might track them down and find out what they saw and heard that fateful night. We also hear nothing from the nurse who was supposed to be in charge of the floor that night. Their central character, instead, is the one person whom they do name, one Edward Prise, but he had left for the night almost two hours before Forrestal’s death.

  We might note, as well, that the name of this Edward Prise appears in none of the contemporaneous accounts of the death in the major news-papers, and his story contradicts some of the basic facts in those stories. For instance, news accounts place the time of the declining of the sleeping pill at 1:45 a.m., not much earlier in the evening as Prise tells us through Hoopes and Brinkley. The news accounts also note nothing irregular or unusual about the corpsman who was on guard at the time of the death. He is named as Apprentice Robert Wayne Harrison, Jr., and he is nowhere described as a substitute for the regular person on duty. By those early accounts, it was not a case of an inexperienced corpsman not recognizing danger signals who allowed himself to be wheedled into leaving his post. Rather, the guard, according to the hospital, had simply been relaxed from 100% of the time to checks on Forrestal every five minutes. So great had been Forrestal’s improvement, so little did anyone fear that he would commit suicide, that not only was he routinely being permitted unobserved, ready access to an easily-opened 16th-floor window, but he was also “being allowed to shave himself and... belts were permissible on his dressing gown and pajamas.” And Harrison’s guard shift did not begin at midnight as told in the Prise account, but at 9:00 p.m. as related by The Washington Post on May 23, 1949.

  So where, we must wonder, did Hoopes and Brinkley get their Edward Prise story? Their three references are as follows:

  [John] Osborne, “Forrestal,” unpublished manuscript outline; Rogow, James Forrestal, pp. 16-17; and Lyle Stuart, Why: the Magazine of Popular Psychiatry I, no. 1 (November 1950), pp. 3-9, 20-27.

  Let’s take them in reverse order.

  Why? The Magazine of Popular Psychiatry is truly obscure. Ac-cording to a search at the Library of Congress, only two libraries in the country have back issues of this long-defunct periodical, and when we tried to get a copy we found that their collections did not go back to the cited premier issue. At any rate, that would appear to be a rather poor secondary source.

  The second reference, for its part, flatly contradicts the Prise account. According to Arnold Rogow, the Navy corpsman to whom Forrestal declined the offer of a sedative for sleeping was the same one who later looked in on Forrestal to see hi
m copying the poem. Like the newspapers, Rogow makes no mention of this man being a substitute for the regular man on duty. Furthermore, according to Rogow, the corpsman’s absence from the scene was innocent, not because he had been ordered away by Forrestal to give him the opportunity to take his plunge. He was merely off on an “errand,” apparently of his own volition. And Rogow goes Hoopes and Brinkley one better when it comes to not naming people. Not only does Edward Prise play no role in his account, but Rogow doesn’t name anyone, not even Harrison, who had already been named in the newspapers of the day.

  We might also note that the Rogow account is also in conflict with contemporaneous news stories with respect to the rejection of the sedative. Rogow says that that happened late on Saturday night, but the newspapers say that it took place when Harrison looked in on Forrestal at 1:45, which would be Sunday morning, and found him awake, after he had appeared to be sleeping at 1:30. Forrestal’s declining of the pill, by news accounts, even prompted Harrison to go wake up the staff psychiatrist on duty on the 16th floor, Dr. Robert R. Deen, and ask him what they should do about it.

  On page 16, Rogow reveals that Hoopes and Brinkley are apparently wrong about a steak dinner that Admiral Morton Willcutts, the head of the National Naval Center of which the Bethesda Naval Hospital is a part, watched Forrestal eat. He is in agreement with Simpson that that took place on Friday, not Saturday as Hoopes and Brinkley say.

  That brings us to the unpublished manuscript of journalist John Os-borne, who died in 1981 after working as a journalist for the Associated Press and as an editor for Time and The New Republic. We were eventually able to locate it among his papers bequeathed to the Library of Congress. Sure enough, there we find the elusive and clairvoyant Edward Prise, playing the central role of the drama. Curiously, though, Os-borne writes that he was able to interview all the key people surrounding Forrestal’s death, but the only one whose account he gives us is from a person who was not actually there when Forrestal went out of the window.

  Daughter of Key Forrestal Witness Surfaces

  We received the following email message on September 26, 2017:

  I started reading your article on the Forrestal death. I got to the part about Edward Prise's story being irrelevant. He was my father and I can tell you he lived in fear of something happening because of information he knew about the case. We grew up hearing whispers between our parents in reference to this matter but were not allowed to ask for details. Even up until a year prior to my father's death in 1991 he had called me and was in fear that he was going to be questioned again about the issue. It might have been irrelevant to you but it was not irrelevant to my family, it was always a shadow in our lives.

  The article to which she refers is the one that this first chapter is built upon, first published in 2002.14 It is clear that Prise’s daughter had only just discovered the article, almost 15 years after its first posting on the Internet, because, as we can see, she reacted strongly and negatively to what seemed to be the minimization of the importance of her father in the article. Had she waited until she had finished Part 2, posted in 2004, her reaction would have been very different, because we restore Prise to a place of great importance in that installment, as we shall see in Chapter Four.15

  We can also see that in that one brief paragraph Edward Prise’s daughter completely reverses the role for which her father had been cast, first by Osborne in his unpublished work and then by Hoopes and Brinkley. The words that those writers put in his mouth would never have made him afraid to talk about what he knew of the Forrestal death, as we see was the case, even to his own children. From the daughter we get the distinct impression that there was something very dark and menacing surrounding Forrestal’s death, something quite different from the routine suicide that the world has been given to believe, and Prise’s account reinforces according to Hoopes and Brinkley. Their book would have been in progress in 1991, and it is likely that one of them had questioned Prise in that year, prompting his agitated call to his daughter.

  Secret Investigation Report

  So why did Hoopes and Brinkley have to reach so far for this source, especially when he is apparently a very poor witness who wasn’t even around when Forrestal took his tragic plunge? What about the findings of the review board that was appointed by the same Admiral Willcutts who observed Forrestal dining on steak on Friday? Here’s how The New York Times described the board’s upcoming work on May 24:

  The board will consider all the circumstances of Mr. Forrestal’s illness and of what happened in the few minutes when he was left unattended, walked out of his room into a diet kitchen and jumped. Today the board outlined the procedures it would follow and visited the scene of the death. Tomorrow it will hear witnesses, including Capt. [George] Raines, the psychiatrist attending Mr. Forrestal.

  Why, you might ask, didn’t Hoopes and Brinkley simply go to the transcript of those hearings and tell us what the most immediate witnesses had to say? At this point, the best expression that comes to mind is one frequently used by the former Miami Herald’ s humorous columnist, Dave Barry, “I’m not making this up.” The hearings were secret and the transcript was still secret when Hoopes and Brinkley wrote their book.

  It is true that Admiral Willcutts, Admiral Leslie Stone, the Bethesda Hospital commandant, Dr. George N. Raines, the Navy psychiatrist in charge of the case, and Dr. Frank J. Broschart, Montgomery County (Maryland) coroner, all publicly called the death a suicide virtually immediately after it happened (in violation of the basic investigative rule of police that all violent deaths should be treated as murder until sufficient evidence is gathered to prove otherwise). But, on what basis, one might ask, did the duly appointed investigative body, Admiral Willcutts’ review board, conclude that it was, indeed, a suicide?

  Dave Barry’s favorite expression is appropriate once again. I’m not making this up. The answer is that it didn’t. Here is what the investigation concluded, as reported on page 15 of the October 12, 1949, New York Times. The full article, including the headlines, is given here:

  Navy Absolves All in Forrestal Leap Investigating Board Report on Death Submitted May 30, Revealed by Matthews

  Special to the New York Times

  Washington, Oct. 11. Francis P. Matthews, Secretary of the Navy, made public today the report of an investigating board absolving all individuals of blame in the death of James Forrestal last May 22. The former Secretary of Defense leaped to his death from an upper story of the Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Maryland.

  The text of the report declared:

  1. That the body found on the ledge outside of Building 1 of the National Medical Center at 1:50 A.M. and pronounced dead at 1:55 A.M. Sunday, May 22, 1949, was identified as that of the late James V. Forrestal, a patient in the neuropsychiatric service of the United States Naval Hospital National Medical Center.

  2. That the late James V. Forrestal died about 1:50 A.M. on Sunday, May 22, 1949, at the National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Mary-land, as a result of injuries, multiple extreme, received incident to a fall from a high point in the tower, Building 1.

  3. That the behavior of the deceased during the period of the stay in the hospital preceding his death was indicative of a mental depression.

  4. That the treatment and precautions in the conduct of the case were in agreement with accepted psychiatric practice and commensurate with the evident status of the patient at all times.

  5. That the death was not caused in any manner by the intent, fault, negligence or inefficiency of any person or persons in the naval service or connected therewith.

  The board, appointed by Rear Admiral Morton D. Willcutts, then head of the Naval Medical Center, submitted its report on May 30. The Navy announcement today gave no explanation of the delay in making the findings public.

  Shortly after Mr. Forrestal’s death, Navy psychiatrists explained that their patient had reached a stage in his recovery where a necessary “calculated risk” had to be assumed in permitting him
more liberty of movement and less supervision. He climbed through the window of a kitchen during the temporary absence from his floor of an orderly, who otherwise would have seen him and who could have prevented the jump.

  At least The New York Times is consistent. Its very first report in the last edition of its May 22 newspaper begins, “James Forrestal, former Secretary of Defense jumped thirteen stories to his death early this morning from the sixteenth floor of the Naval Medical Center.” Notice, though, that it only took the Willcutts review board a week to wrap up its inquiry, but the Navy took over four months to release this inadequate little summary of the findings, which was buried away on an inside page of The New York Times.

  And look at the Navy’s conclusions. They tell us only that Forrestal died from the injuries caused by the fall and that no one associated with the hospital or the Navy was responsible in any way for the fall. What they don’t say is what caused the fall. They don’t even venture to remind us that the sash of a hospital gown, presumably Forrestal’s, was tied tightly around the neck of the corpse, which they thoroughly establish was that of Forrestal. By not mentioning it, they are relieved of any requirement to explain, or even to speculate upon, its purpose and who might have done the tying of the sash.

  Hoopes and Brinkley say quite confidently that Forrestal had tied one end of the sash to a radiator below the window and that it “gave way,” whatever that means. All The New York Times had to say about the sash in its front-page May 23 article was as follows: